Chromecast got ads in ~2015. I was keenly aware of this because paying for YouTube premium didn't get rid of ads on Chromecast (yet).
Must have been some hardware combination or something unique where I never got them until recently, and it was quite jarring.
That's very unusual. Maybe you had been paying for Premium as part of something else (like Google One or Fi)? I'm not sure if a pihole or other hardware device can block YouTube ads, but if it can maybe that's a possibility?
I’d like to say that I don’t mind YouTube ads but I actually do much of the time because they try to sell me on an investment scam, some tactical doomsday merch, or fundamentalist religion depending on the theme of the video. Many YouTube ads truly feel adversarial and it is hard to not mind that.
I got one that straight up told me my penis was too small to please my partner. I have to say that you'd think the supposed best and brightest that FAANG companies hire could come up with a bit more of a sophisticated pitch than "your peepee is too small".
It's funny that we used to laugh about pirate websites having those kinds of ads, but the difference now is just that it's "ok" videos instead of banners drawn using MSPaint.
Presumably this would also break timestamp links more generally?
No, because the YT frontend knows that a different video is played. It must know at least to make them unskippable.
It's just that both ads and video are bundled inside one response, but the format is YT-specific.
If ads get too annoying people will start running a YouTube frontend and probably switch from on-demand video viewing to a DVR format where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time. Maybe the frontend can pretend to have watched the full video and ads, I'm sure that'll go over wonderfully with advertisers.
>YouTube frontend [...] where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time. I think the post is saying the ads would be burned into the regular video stream such that even offline downloaders such as youtube-dl would also get the ads . The current common behavior is the actual video and the ads videos are 2 different streams. The javascript in the web browser switches back & forth between the str…
This is the kind of thing where people will put a lot of effort to engineer a good machine learning / AI solution to get rid of these ads. If it’s something that people hate they’ll put all their effort into stopping it. Google might’ve actually made their situation worse with this as it’ll force people to innovate and come up with new ways of countering their bs.
“Love, friendship and respect do not unite men as much as a common hatred for something.”
>YouTube frontend [...] where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time. I think the post is saying the ads would be burned into the regular video stream such that even offline downloaders such as youtube-dl would also get the ads . The current common behavior is the actual video and the ads videos are 2 different streams. The javascript in the web browser switches back & forth between the str…
It shouldn't be that difficult for video downloaders to learn how to strip out in-video ads . They're going to be a sharp cut both in video and audio, for a specific, fairly-well-known length of time, then a cut back.
And even if platform starts to make blurry transitions for ads, adjust volume/brightness, or even overlay ad text over existing video like a watermark, client can just download the same video multiple times and remove unique frames/pixels.
>YouTube frontend [...] where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time. I think the post is saying the ads would be burned into the regular video stream such that even offline downloaders such as youtube-dl would also get the ads . The current common behavior is the actual video and the ads videos are 2 different streams. The javascript in the web browser switches back & forth between the str…
This is the kind of thing where people will put a lot of effort to engineer a good machine learning / AI solution to get rid of these ads. If it’s something that people hate they’ll put all their effort into stopping it. Google might’ve actually made their situation worse with this as it’ll force people to innovate and come up with new ways of countering their bs. “Love, friendship and respect do not unite men as muc…
In the book/movie Contact, the person who bankrolls the main character's project made all of his wealth from creating inventions that defeated advertisements.
If it's accpetable to embed ads into the video file then as a video producer why not just negotiate with advertisers directly and cut out the Google middleman. Negotiate a deal with an advertiser and then have the advertiser send some ad video that the video producer can edit into her videos with ffmpeg. This allows the video producer to choose the advertiser(s) she wants.
I’d like to say that I don’t mind YouTube ads but I actually do much of the time because they try to sell me on an investment scam, some tactical doomsday merch, or fundamentalist religion depending on the theme of the video. Many YouTube ads truly feel adversarial and it is hard to not mind that.
I turned off personalization a while ago. I get ads for Mint Mobile, a local spa, an Internet fast fashion men's T-shirt company, dog food, and similar anodyne topics. It feels a little like watching 90s daytime TV.
So...was that before or after turning off personalization?
If ads get too annoying people will start running a YouTube frontend and probably switch from on-demand video viewing to a DVR format where you pre-download videos from your favorite creators ahead of time. Maybe the frontend can pretend to have watched the full video and ads, I'm sure that'll go over wonderfully with advertisers.
I already largely watch YouTube through RSS feeds to find the videos and yt-dlp to download them locally. Ads injected straight into the stream will be annoying, but still just as easy to skip as the sponsored content sections of videos. That said, the ads on YouTube have gotten more and more scammy and suspicious over the years, so I don't particularly appreciate being incorporated into the video feed itself. But it…
There is some talk that YT are making it such that trying to seek will not skip the ad.